I think I see how this could be problematic. Suppose you did a double slit experiment with two entangled particles separated by a significant distance. Then turning on the detector for one of them would communicate an effect to the motion of the other which would travel faster than the speed of light. Is that what you have mind? — Dusty of Sky

I don't think Euclidian geometry is necessarily universally true in the same way that classical logic is. A principle like "there is exactly one straight line passing through any two points" is always true with regard to our perception of space. We can't imagine a non-Euclidian realm in which the principle does not hold. But just because non-Euclidian space is unimaginable does not mean it's inconceivable. Non-Euclidian space violates the principles of sensory perception but not the principles of rational thought. My claim is that a logic in which the principle of distributivity is false does violate the laws of thought such that any claim made in such a logic, regardless of its usefulness, amounts to nonsense if we actually try to conceive of its meaning. It is impossible to think the proposition "((A1 or A2) and R) and not ((A1 and R) or (A2 and R))". You can write it out in symbols and claim that it is true, but you don't actually have a concept of what you are affirming any more than you have a concept of a married bachelor. — Dusty of Sky

So is Putnam's argument that we ought to sacrifice the universality of classical logic in order to preserve realism and locality? — Dusty of Sky

If I understand you correctly, we're talking about conceptual dependence here. That I can deal with. It even has a natural connection to Frege's saturated/unsaturated distinction: "___ is thinking it's going to rain" is unsaturated, incomplete, and therefore an abstraction, and therefore has only dependent existence. — Srap Tasmaner

I was seriously afraid that "independent existence" was going to lead to having to say what the ultimate constituents of the universe are! — Srap Tasmaner

You have a comfort level with QM that I don't, so I thought that might not scare you as much as it does me; or, rather, it might be something I would rather not have to do just to talk about what ordinary sentences mean, but you might not mind! — Srap Tasmaner

The second way to teach quantum mechanics leaves a blow-by-blow account of its discovery to the historians, and instead starts directly from the conceptual core -- namely, a certain generalization of probability theory to allow minus signs. — Scott Aaronson - Lecture 9: Quantum

For Aristotle, ordinary objects (his primary substances) were the fundamental entities.
— Andrew M

So here maybe we're talking about what is conceptually fundamental, and for what Sellars calls the "manifest image" (or for Strawson's "descriptive metaphysics") that is indeed going to be sensible objects and persons. — Srap Tasmaner

I think I understand, but please tell me if I am missing something. So when the photon hits R, as long we hold to a realist interpretation, we must assume that it passes through either A1 or A2. So R is true, and (A1 or A2) is true. The former is verified by observation and the latter by realist assumptions. Therefore, their conjunction is true. — Dusty of Sky

But neither (A1 and R) nor (A2 and R) can be verified as true, since we don't observe the photon to pass through either A1 or A2. So the statement "(A1 and R) or (A2 and R)" is evaluated as false, because neither disjuncts can be verified. (Or can they in fact be verified as false? When we measure A1 and A2 individually, do we never or only sometimes detect a photon passing through them?) — Dusty of Sky

I don't think that this proves that the principle of distributivity fails. It may be useful to not apply distributivity when dealing with quantum phenomena, but that doesn't mean that the principle is false. It is inconceivable for the principle to be actually false. If R is true and A1 or A2 is true, then either R and A1 is true or R and A2 is true. That's a simple tautology. Just because we can discover more in quantum mechanics by not applying a principle does not necessarily mean that the principle is false. And if we have reason to believe that the principle is necessarily and universally true, as I think we do in the case of distributivity, then its usefulness in quantum mechanics should make no difference. Even if we treat it as false in quantum mechanics, I don't think we must interpret this as invalidating the principle's universality. — Dusty of Sky

We must now ask: what is the nature of the world if the proposed interpretation of quantum mechanics is the correct one? The answer is both radical and simple. Logic is as empirical as geometry. It makes as much sense to speak of 'physical logic' as of 'physical geometry'. We live in a world with a non-classical logic. Certain statements - just the ones we encounter in daily life - do obey classical logic, but this is so because the corresponding subspaces of H(S) form a very special lattice under the inclusion relation: a so-called 'Boolean lattice'. Quantum mechanics itself explains the approximate validity of classical logic 'in the large', just as non-Euclidean geometry explains the approximate validity of Euclidean geometry 'in the small'. — Putnam: The logic of quantum mechanics, p184

Perhaps it is true that either (A1 and R) or (A2 and R), but since we can verify neither disjunct, we treat it as false, not because it is false in reality because our measurements fail to demonstrate it. (Or, if our measurements in fact demonstrate the contrary, that the photon passed through neither, then we would have to interpret the act of measurement as affecting the photon). — Dusty of Sky

Right, this is the part of your position I've ignored: abstract entities have only dependent, not independent existence. By "reify" you mean precisely attributing independent existence to something that doesn't have it.

Here's one way we can talk. There is a general event type, someone thinking it's going to rain; there is a particular event type, Alice thinking it's going to rain; and then there are particular instances of that, Alice's thinking yesterday that it was going to rain. (Obviously lots of other ways to carve that up...)

That last is a particular, but in your terms it is not a concrete particular, not because of anything to do with types and instances but because every instance of Alice thinking it's going to rain is dependent for its existence on Alice existing, is inseparable from Alice. We separate what Alice is thinking from Alice only fictively, by means of abstraction.

And then two people thinking the same thing is still as simple as I want it to be, just a matter of using the same words to describe what you fictively detach as "what they're thinking." If you then generalize, you can talk about the idea "that it is going to rain" as what anyone you would describe as thinking it's going to rain is thinking. — Srap Tasmaner

One little question: in this analysis, every instance of Alice thinking it's going to rain is dependent for its existence on Alice existing, not on Alice independently existing, right? I'd love to stay away from saying what that's supposed to mean, but we don't seem to rely on it anyway. Do you agree? — Srap Tasmaner

So far we're juggling general vs. particular, abstract vs. concrete, and dependent vs. independent. There are obvious temptations to match them up (respectively) that I'm trying to be careful about. — Srap Tasmaner

So glad you've chimed in, Andrew M! — Srap Tasmaner

Your approach (which you would say is broadly Aristotelian?) seems very sound: there is only one sense of "abstraction"; it is what we do when we consider a particular concrete context selectively. — Srap Tasmaner

I wonder, though, why is existence -- as in the first quote
Even if not, it doesn't follow that abstractions are nothing.
— Andrew M
-- part of this story at all? If Alice is thinking it's going to rain, why even say that there is a thing, the thought that it is going to rain, that does exist, only it doesn't exist independently of Alice thinking it is going to rain, or of someone thinking it is going to rain? — Srap Tasmaner

I ask for two reasons:

(1) If I'm of a mind to deny that Alice thinking something entails there is something Alice is thinking (( that is, except as a matter of grammar; I mean to deny only that "there is" should be taken in the full-blooded sense of something existing )), and you insist that we can consider what Alice is thinking independently of the concrete occasion of Alice thinking it, I do not need to deny this -- why would I? I only need to deny that us considering what Alice is thinking entails there being something we are considering. — Srap Tasmaner

(2) If the point is to emphasize our capacity to consider things selectively, and to describe this somewhat picturesquely as an ability conjure abstract entities for our consideration rather than being compelled always and only to consider the totality of the concrete situation, I will point out that we are already doing that all the time simply by using language in the first place. — Srap Tasmaner

Insofar as we want to ignore whatever else is going on with Alice except her thinking about the chance of rain and taking her umbrella, we say, "Alice is taking her umbrella because she thinks it's going to rain." "Considering selectively" is not a special thing we do sometimes with language; it's practically all we ever do. — Srap Tasmaner

But there does seem to be an exception to the idea that language is always selective: names of concrete particulars. When we refer to Alice, we mean everything about her, or at least intend not specifically to exclude anything about her.

The question then is whether, in creating "names" on-the-fly, we are referring to abstract particulars such as "Alice taking her umbrella" (an action or an event), and that question seems particularly acute when the name is anaphoric and thus somewhat open-ended: "what Alice said" or "what Alice did" or "what Alice was thinking". — Srap Tasmaner

The tl;dr is that if what's being thought is an abstract entity, is that because there's something special about thinking? or because thinking is acting? or because thinking is an event occurring? Is it abstract because it's thinking, or because all our descriptions are abstractions? — Srap Tasmaner

1. "Alice is grabbing her umbrella" is also an abstraction, right? We are leaving out whatever else is going on with Alice in describing her current behavior as "grabbing her umbrella". — Srap Tasmaner

2. "Alice thinks it's going to rain" is an abstraction in the same way (1) is -- we're not talking about whatever else may be going on in her mind -- but is it an abstraction in some other way? Is there another sense of abstraction in play here? — Srap Tasmaner

3. Alice is a concrete entity and Alice's umbrella is a concrete entity; is "Alice grabbing her umbrella" an abstract entity? Is that what actions are? Or events? How do we capture the difference between "Alice grabbing her umbrella", a sort of abstract event that might occur, and "Alice is grabbing her umbrella" which, while an abstraction in the simple sense of (1) is pretty concrete -- it's a realization of "Alice grabbing her umbrella" after all. — Srap Tasmaner

4. Is there yet a third sense of "abstract" — Srap Tasmaner

Which camp do you roughly fall into and what are your arguments for it? — khaled

Aristotle introduces matter and form, in the Physics, to account for changes in the natural world, where he is particularly interested in explaining how substances come into existence even though, as he maintains, there is no generation ex nihilo, that is that nothing comes from nothing. — Form vs. Matter - SEP

Sure, but what goes in place of "something" in "Alice is kicking something"? It's a noun phrase of some kind:

(a) A proper name: "Alice is kicking Steve";
(b) An indefinite noun phrase: "Alice is kicking a ball";
(c) A definite noun phrase: "Alice is kicking the ball."

Can we do the same thing with "Alice is thinking something"? No, no, and no. — Srap Tasmaner

• If Alice is thinking that it is going to rain, must we conclude there is something that Alice is thinking?

Anaphoric constructions aside, we know what goes in place of "something" in "Alice is thinking something"; it's constructions like

"that the roof will never hold"
"of going to graduate to school in the fall"
"about her grandmother's house".

Any of those look like things to you? — Srap Tasmaner

So this is the question:

If Alice is thinking something, must we conclude there is something that Alice is thinking? — Srap Tasmaner

• If Alice is kicking something, must we conclude there is something that Alice is kicking?

I've always been interested in 'certainty' and our existence.

Now, if we can't be certain about anything, even our own existence, then how does probability help support that we exist? — Tom343

Surely I am as likely to exist as I am not to exist? — Tom343

If we cannot prove certainty, how does probability come into play? How am I more likely to exist than not? — Tom343

I don't think this necessarily contradicts the principle of distributivity. It seems that measuring which slit the photon goes through affects the conditions of the experiment. So if you don't measure, then both ((A1 or A2) and R) and ((A1 and R) or (A2 and R)) are true. If you do measure, then both are at least potentially false because not-R can be true. Am I still missing something? — Dusty of Sky

   1
 / | \
A1 A2 R
 \ | /
   0

  (A1 or A2) and R
= 1 and R
= R

  (A1 and R) or (A2 and R)
= 0 or 0
= 0

Also, here's a derivation of one side of the principle of distributivity. The principle follows from more basic logical principles, so if you reject distributivity, you must also reject at least one of the other principles used in this derivation. — Dusty of Sky

I can't conceive how an observation which violates principle of distributivity could be possible. What would that even look like? Putnam is an accomplished and respected philosopher, so I'm sure there's something I'm missing. I'll try to read the paper again at some point and hope I have better luck with it. But if you think you understand what he's saying, please try to explain. — Dusty of Sky

Addendum: after glancing at the equations on pp180-181, I see that he's using probability. I don't have a good grasp of probabilistic logic, but my understanding is that it adds a number of layers of complexity and uncertainty to classical logic. I may be wrong, but I think that the principles of probabilistic logic are quite contentious among logicians. Perhaps quantum mechanics only violates ordinary principles of probabilistic logic, not classical logic. — Dusty of Sky

Mathematically, quantum mechanics can be regarded as a non-classical probability calculus resting upon a non-classical propositional logic.
...
For Putnam, the elements of L(H) represent categorical properties that an object possesses, or does not, independently of whether or not we look. Inasmuch as this picture of physical properties is confirmed by the empirical success of quantum mechanics, we must, on this view, accept that the way in which physical properties actually hang together is not Boolean. Since logic is, for Putnam, very much the study of how physical properties actually hang together, he concludes that classical logic is simply mistaken: the distributive law is not universally valid. — Quantum Logic and Probability Theory - SEP

Perhaps quantum mechanics only violates ordinary principles of probabilistic logic, not classical logic. — Dusty of Sky

That’s because the photon doesn’t go through A1 OR A2, it goes through A1 AND A2. — Pfhorrest

I tried to read the paper by Hillary Putnam, but there were too many difficult equations, so I'm hoping that someone here can make his case in more ordinary language. — Dusty of Sky

Whoever Craig and Mooreland are, they might wish to take a college-level course in mathematics. There’s no paradox that I can see here, only a metaphor for some bijections from N to a subset of N. — Olivier5

Hilbert's Hotel is absurd. Mind you, it's logically correct for the mathematician but it's impossible for something like Hilbert's Hotel to really exist. You can describe it on paper but it cannot exist in reality. Illustrations like these showed that the existence of an actually infinite number of things is impossible.

Now sometimes people react to Hilbert's Hotel by saying that these paradoxes result because we can't understand the infinite - that it's just beyond us. But this reaction is in fact mistaken and naive. Infinite set theory is a highly developed and well understood branch of modern mathematics.

These absurdities result not because we do not understand the infinite but because we do understand the nature of the actual infinite. Hilbert was a smart guy and he knew well how to illustrate the bizarre consequences of an actually infinite number of things. — Hilbert's Hotel and Infinity - William Lane Craig (from 4:30)

We have already seen that the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality, no matter what experiences, observations, and knowledge are appealed to. Can thought about things be so much different from things? Can thinking processes be so unlike the actual processes of things? In short, can thought be so far removed from reality? Rather is it not clear that, when we think that we have encountered the infinite in some real sense, we have merely been seduced into thinking so by the fact that we often encounter extremely large and extremely small dimensions in reality?
...
In summary, let us return to our main theme and draw some conclusions from all our thinking about the infinite. Our principal result is that the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought — a remarkable harmony between being and thought. In contrast to the earlier efforts of Frege and Dedekind, we are convinced that certain intuitive concepts and insights are necessary conditions of scientific knowledge, and logic alone is not sufficient. Operating with the infinite can be made certain only by the finitary.

The role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea — if one means by an idea, in Kant's terminology, a concept of reason which transcends all experience and which completes the concrete as a totality — that of an idea which we may unhesitatingly trust within the framework erected by our theory. — On the infinite - David Hilbert

We can conduct experiments to determine a specific finite age of the Earth. But how would we test whether something was infinite in age, size or number as opposed to just really, really large?
— Andrew M

Obviously, not by counting or measuring directly. We don't hold a stopwatch to measure the age of the earth either - we use other measurements to establish theories in which the age of the earth is a bound variable. Same with the size of the universe: it makes a difference to the theories that we use to explain astrophysical observations - their accuracy, simplicity and compatibility with other well-established theories. You can't just arbitrarily choose a size without breaking a bunch of stuff. — SophistiCat

I don't know why they think that. But if it's to be a thought experiment about the physical world, then we have no experimental evidence that there is, or can be, anything infinite. And what would such an experiment look like? How would it be measured?
— Andrew M

Same way as how we establish anything in science: that Earth is ~4.5 Gyr old ("How could you possibly know? Were you there?!"), that pulsars are neutron stars, etc. We develop models and evaluate their closeness of fit, simplicity, and other epistemic and scientific virtues. — SophistiCat

Why Craig and Mooreland think that the existence of Hilbert’s Hotel would be absurd?
Why they think the absurdity of Hilbert’s Hotel implies that no actual infinite collection can exist? — jay232

Let's face it: Despite their seductive allure, we have no direct observational evidence for either the infinitely big or the infinitely small.
...
Not only do we lack evidence for the infinite but we don't need the infinite to do physics. — Edge - 2014: What Scientific idea Is Ready For Retirement? - Infinity - Max Tegmark

Conclusion: Standard individual-scale policy approaches such as isolation, contact tracing and monitoring are rapidly (computationally) overwhelmed in the face of mass infection, and thus also cannot be relied upon to stop a pandemic. Multiscale population approaches including drastically pruning contact networks using collective boundaries and social behavior change, and community self-monitoring, are essential.

Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.

It will cost something to reduce mobility in the short term, but to fail do so will eventually cost everything—if not from this event, then one in the future. Outbreaks are inevitable, but an appropriately precautionary response can mitigate systemic risk to the globe at large. But policy- and decision-makers must act swiftly and avoid the fallacy that to have an appropriate respect for uncertainty in the face of possible irreversible catastrophe amounts to "paranoia," or the converse a belief that nothing can be done. — Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Systemic risk of pandemic via novel pathogens – Coronavirus: A note, New England Complex Systems Institute (January 26, 2020).

But we needn't be and I hope are not on opposite sides, but rather put such understandings that we generate and evolve through "to the question" as simply a part of a shared goal of getting a handle on an idea that at first look seems to me fatally problematic. — tim wood

Information (or state) is an abstraction of physical systems (PS).
— Andrew M

Would you agree, on reflection, that in this context (hereinafter to be understood if not stated), that either this is exactly wrong, or needs qualification to be right? If information corresponds to state, then information just is itself and cannot be other than itself - without being other. If information is descriptive of any PS, then it is not that PS, but its own distinct PS, and if that PS is the idea of the thing, then that itself becomes difficult. — tim wood

Or another, that from the metamorphic rock from under an ancient and long gone streambed it is possible to recover what stone what sauron kicked into it on a day 100,000,000 years ago, and the configuration of the splash. Of course some of that evidence went up as water vapor, so part of the recovery must involve the entire atmosphere of the earth - or not? Is the information complete in parts or does it require the whole? — tim wood

I mean in these to evoke a sense of the aporia I think intrinsic to the problem. If information is just state, then it is at the moment and not otherwise. If information is knowable, then the state-as-information must also create some kind of meta-information/state (or something without yet a name) that travels through time, or endures through time, that preserves the original state, somehow. And that asks as to the question of meta-meta-...-meta information/states.

For the theorem to be meaningful it must cut through all of this, yes? — tim wood

And again, whatever QI is, to be information in any sense must (yes?) mean that it "contains" something that it itself is not, that can be extracted from it, apparently non-destructively, which implies repeatedly. And that something in every case is part of a recoverable path to the unbounded future and the unbounded past, somehow, someway. — tim wood

Proper laws of physics are reversible and therefore preserve the distinctions between states - i.e. information. In this sense, the conservation of information is more fundamental than other physical quantities such as temperature or energy. — Statistical Mechanics - Entropy and conservation of information - Susskind

Liouville's theorem can be thought of as information conservation. The laws of mechanics are equivalent to the rules governing state transition. — Classical Mechanics - Liouville’s theorem - Susskind

And it seems quickly clear that this kind of language and thinking is not adequate for this task. If the theorem is true - one supposes it is - then the language has to be very tightly defined and constrained. I suspect past the breaking point. Information must finally reduce to mere being, and being as information leads to some ferocious paradoxes. — tim wood

Do we know, of this "quantum information," if a) it can ever be what we call knowledge, i.e., known, and, b) can it always be known, in the sense of retrieved? Or not retrieved? Or not retrievable? — tim wood

I imagine throwing a stone into the ocean thereby disturbing the water. And maybe that determines uniquely the future of the ocean. The ocean, then, stores a record of that disturbance. But how is that to be recognized as such, and how retrieved as to the particulars that make that what it is? — tim wood

Might it be the case that the no-hide theorem merely means that change is in some sense permanent? Anyone? — tim wood

In order to make the first qubit “lose” its information, the scientists had to make the system undergo a bleaching process. In their experiment, they bleached the system through quantum state randomization, in which the qubit transforms from a pure state to a mixed state. Although the randomization operation causes the qubit to appear to lose the information contained in the pure state, the scientists showed that the information could be found in one of the two ancilla qubits. They also demonstrated how to use the ancilla qubits to reconstruct the original state, showing that no information was hiding in the correlations between the original qubit and the ancilla qubits, which is the essence of the no-hiding theorem. — Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time

I would answer the same way if the information were merely irretrievable, since the information does still exist.
— Andrew M

But if it were irretrievable, from our perspective the situation is identical with that where it doesn't exist. — hypericin

Which one doesn't matter. But what does matter is that one is erased so that the records are kept right. — apokrisis

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the no hiding theorem. Right now I'm thinking of a 10 digit number. I'm not repeating it, and there's no way I will remember it in 5 minutes. Could a sufficiently clever alien, arriving on a venus like earth 10 million years from now, retrieve it? — hypericin

Would you answer the same way if the no hiding theorem turned out to be false? Or true, but information can still be irretrievably, in principle as well as practice, lost and inaccessible? — hypericin

Open the box. What is the status of the 2 hundred dollar bills? — hypericin

Embattled US President Donald Trump has once again taken aim at New Zealand over our recent resurgence of coronavirus, describing yesterday's five new cases as a "massive break out" as US cases continue to grow by tens of thousand everyday.

Speaking to a crowd in Pennsylvania, Trump said: "You look at our mortality rates, you look at all the things but they like to compare us to others so they were talking about New Zealand.

"New Zealand, New Zealand, it's over for New Zealand, everything's gone, it's all over - they're beautiful," said Trump, referencing the global acclaim New Zealand received for its response.

"They had a massive break out yesterday."

...

"New Zealand, by the way, had a big outbreak, and other countries that were held up to try and make us look not as good as we should look, and we've done an incredible job," he claimed.

"They're having a lot of outbreaks, but they'll be able to put them out, and we'll be able put them out."

...

The US death toll from Covid-19 is rapidly approaching 175,000 while New Zealand's stands at 22.

On the day that we recorded five new cases, the US recorded 46,500 according to the Centre for Disease Control.

Trump's comments are the third time this week that he has referenced New Zealand as he attempts to paint his handling of the pandemic in a better light. — NZ Herald - Covid 19 coronavirus: Donald Trump takes aim at NZ again

Where or what is this entity, "the state of affairs representation", if it isn't the wet stuff it represents, and it isn't a part of the report? I suppose you will say that it's an abstraction. — bongo fury

Ok, but please stop implicating modern nominalism in any such business? — bongo fury

And on your view?
— Andrew M

The pointing of symbols at things by social animals.
— bongo fury

Animals who, if they have any sense, regard

is it raining or not independently of any report or statement?
— Andrew M

as an invitation to confused logic, with cycles in it. And usually do, and get on with the weather report, instead. — bongo fury

On your view, is it raining or not independently of any representation? — bongo fury

No, because I make a distinction between what the weather is and what a person says the weather is.

It seems that you don't make that distinction.
— Andrew M

I make it when it makes sense: as when a weather report for any reason offers comparison of its own findings with those of Alice and Bob. — bongo fury

... or which, in other words, SA2 and SA3 were talking about, as I said.

So, SA1 (or asserting it) is talking about the weather, while SA2 and SA3 are talking about the talking?

But SA1 isn't the weather (e.g. it isn't wet), but rather represents or talks about it.
— bongo fury

Or not? — bongo fury

If so, then "obtaining" is plainly interchangeable with "true", and the SA layer gratuitous. — bongo fury

If not, and the SA is the concrete situation, and is literally wet, then an SA isn't composed of subject and predicate, and you need to rethink the "isomorphism" supposedly grounding your truth "function". If you still think that some such mapping is required. — bongo fury

But both her statement and the state of affairs refer to rain, not predication.
— Andrew M

If so, perhaps one of them would suffice? — bongo fury

I can represent the original concrete situation in a model with the following obtaining states of affairs:

(SA1) It is raining
(SA2) Alice says that it is raining
(SA3) Bob says that it is not cloudy
— Andrew M

So, SA1 (or asserting it) is talking about the weather, while SA2 and SA3 are talking about the talking?

But SA1 isn't the weather (e.g. it isn't wet), but rather represents or talks about it. (Likewise, SA2 and SA3 aren't the weather-talk by Alice and Bob but merely talk about that weather-talk.) — bongo fury

So SAR doesn't, as implied here...

Finally, a conditional can be added that relates statements to states of affairs
— Andrew M

... relate talk about the weather to the weather, but only to more talk. — bongo fury

Whether it's comparable will depend on whether you proceed to analyse the weather as a collection of physical particulars related in physical ways, — bongo fury

or as some bizarre kind of weather sentence... with a fifty percent chance of predication, perhaps... something like that? :wink: — bongo fury

Such as? (You may need to decide if you are talking about the weather, or about the talking, or both.) — bongo fury

A nice way to put it. I will keep it in mind. I meant only the distinction between the two, The, on the one hand, "great blooming, buzzing, confusion" that is input, and the coherent, consistent image we make of it. — tim wood

If, for example, you were to explain a "state of affairs" (like a raining) as a type (or set or common property) of concrete situations (which ground or constitute it in a reasonable sense), I might be challenged to show how nominalism can improve on that analysis, or is any less committed to abstractions itself. — bongo fury

That interaction is a physical process involving light reflecting from Aunt Betty to your eyes and subsequent brain processing.
— Andrew M

And thus it is completely clear that whatever "see" means informally or practically, the expression, "I see Aunt Betty," in some senses is completely misleading in the sense that Aunt Betty is never, ever, seen. — tim wood

Interesting on task and achievement parts of speech. We're not about that book, idea, or author; feel free to ignore this question. How does Ryle tell the difference between task and achievement words in use? That is, it would seem he has access to other criteria - that are already available. What is his purpose then in making the distinction? — tim wood

Oh well that's a relief... thank goodness that these intangibles are really quite grounded, and far from being any kind of metaphysical fantasy! :gasp: :rofl: — bongo fury

But they are both abstracted from concrete situations.
— Andrew M

Oh fine, so: not me guvnor, not really hardcore phantasmagoric abstractions but only made from solid "concrete situations"; then ok, I'll have a look. Can "that it is raining outside" please be the actual raining? Can Alice's statement please be her actual utterance? — bongo fury

I guess you needed to go bold with your belief in abstractions to have confidence in this:

They are sharing a pattern, which just is the abstracted common form.
— Andrew M

... in the absence of any semblance of isomorphism between the utterance and the raining. No no no, you will be able to say to that complaint, poor philistine, doesn't understand about abstractions... — bongo fury

Give it a bit of thought. What, exactly, do you receive that your mind makes sense of? Aunt Betty or Uncle Jake? Certainly not! What you receive - is incident on you - is waves of some or another kind. If you think that what you see is the tree or a person or anything else, please give an exact account - or as best you can - as to how that happens, how it works. — tim wood

Against all of this is what I called the language of convenience, which certainly gets the world's work done, and no complaints. You an even call it language based on perception. But on rare occasions it's best to acknowledge and attempt to understand that perception and underlying reality are not the same thing. — tim wood

One big difference between the logical force of a task verb and that of a corresponding achievement verb is that in applying an achievement verb we are asserting that some state of affairs obtains over and above that which consists in the performance, if any, of the subservient task activity.
..
Merely saying ‘I see a hawk’ does not entail that there is a hawk there, though saying truly ‘I see a hawk’ does entail this. — Gilbert Ryle - The Concept of Mind, p131-p135

As a practical matter, absolutely. But I infer you understand perfectly well the objection and thereby can make the distinction between how it is and how it seems on those occasions that require it. — tim wood

That is the entire production of the mind. One kind of evidence is that perception can be wrong. I think that's uncle Jake; oops, it's actually aunt Betty. — tim wood

I'm not sure I understand you. Suppose Alice sees a bird fly by and land on a branch. She perceived the bird flying and then perceived it landing. The difference in those two cases is with the thing perceived (the bird) not the perceiver (Alice).

So that is an example where how the world is perceived and understood depends at least in part on the thing being perceived.
— Andrew M

Eh? All I get from this is that there is a bird and the bird is not Alice. If you mean only that there must be something (usually) that is perceived that is itself not the perceiver, ok. But the perception itself as a perception - which is what I'm thinking we're talking about, depends on the perceiver. Whatever it is that Alice perceives is the product of her mind.

One way to make it clearer about the bird - although less clear about the phenomenon itself - is to remind yourself that "sees the bird" is simply language of convenience, and that of the bird itself or the branch or anything else, Alice actually is seeing zero.

What Alice is working with is her own mind's production. Inputs? Sure. And as a purely practical matter we all agree she "sees" the bird, and that there is a bird and a branch. - Here, another way. That which is in Alice's perception, is that the bird and the branch? Of course not. — tim wood

So, it is their actually sharing a pattern? As with the case of a written melody and the sound represented?

But apparently not, and you shrink from analysing situation and statement both into component parts, and abstracting out a common form:

For example, it is raining outside (the state of affairs) and Alice says that it is raining outside (the statement).
— Andrew M — bongo fury

I'm asking how you use the term "true".
— Andrew M

I point it at the sentences I assert.

For example, I assume you believe there were dinosaurs roaming the Earth millions of years ago based on evidence such as the fossil record. Is your belief true because you have formed it based on that evidence? ...
— Andrew M

Meh. Attitudes... obviously I can assert the wrong sentences, or (equivalently) call those wrongly chosen sentences true. So? — bongo fury